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A double whammy of my own personal stupidity and mother nature. A couple of months ago we went on a week long trip to Knoxville to visit my Sister-In-Law and my new niece. Everything was fine when we got home, except my return pump was blowing bubbles into the DT. I checked the sump, and my float switch had gotten stuck in the "off" position. I tapped it to knock it loose, and so the ATO could refill the sump. Well, I forgot that before I left, I had filled my ATO reservoir with kalk so I could leave my calcium reactor offline while we were gone. I went upstairs to unpack, and my ATO dumped about 15 gallons of saturated kalk into the sump. When I came back downstairs, it was a complete whiteout. I couldn't see even an inch into the tank. I had 50 gallons of saltwater on hand and changed that out. I checked the pH, which is the biggest concern in a kalk overdose, and it was beyond what my kit would measure, so somewhere north of 9. At this point, it's past midnight, so I took off to the local Wal-Mart and in a panic, bought all the soda water i could find, which was only 4 liters. I added 2 liters and the pH was still off the charts. I added 2 more, and the pH was still really high, but I could see the yellow tang that had been laying on the sand at the front of the tank was now swimming. I called it a night and went to bed. In the morning, I could see that all my SPS were toast, as were the yellow tang, hippo tang, wrasse and a couple of others. I fished them out and went about my day. That night, a thunderstorm knocked out our power. It stayed out for 30 hours. I had battery powered bubblers, but in the end, they didn't help, and literally everything besides my pair of maroon clowns, my YWG/pistol pair, a small favia and a handful of palys and ricordeas was dead.

Since then, I took the opportunity to re-aquascape, but I've mostly been trying to get the tank to settle down and become stable. Water parameters are much improved, as evidenced by everything in my acrylic tank thriving, but the 150 keeps having bouts of GHA, bryopsis, dinoflagelates, diatoms, cyano and other crud. PO4 is finally down to less than .5, but my nitrates are still very high. I know it will take a while to settle completely. There was a massive amount of die off, and I think things are still trying to reach equilibrium. I know, I know, nothing good happens fast, but I'd really like to be able to start rebuilding.